Back to: Extras for “LEGO MindStorms EV3 Robots for Absolute Beginners”
Since our students are usually only interested in getting their hands on the LEGO pieces RIGHT NOW, we tend to only use this video in our longer courses. However, even in shorter courses, this video can provide useful background to a teacher who has time to watch it before the class starts.
This is an introductory video in which Ying Chen summarizes the purpose of our LEGO EV3 course that assists students to build several robots, and helps these students to learn how to teach their robots to do what they want them to do, by using LEGO’s EV3-G coding language. Ying also briefly mentions the student-centered approach we take in our tutorials.
We have designed this Teacher’s Mini-MOOC course to be used in association with our YouTube EV3 robotics Play-list that currently (2017) contains 47 introductory videos that are designed for students to be able to work through by themselves with minimal technical supervision.
The next lessons in this “Teacher Introduction” section contains information about features of the video playback facilities that we have found useful when we are assisting in classrooms.
Do you have access to a School Technician?
For Home use, downloading LEGO’s free EV3-G software is necessary before any robot programming can be started. The next tutorials will show you how to do this. You will need to work through the next lessons, preferably without missing any.
However, if you are using this course in a School or University computer laboratory, the technician would have previously downloaded LEGO’s free EV3-G software into your School’s laboratory computers, so you could start your students directly using the Section “Building Your First Robot”. This tutorial takes students directly into the build of our first robot, Botticelli. Why is it named “Botticelli”? Many robots have “bot” in their names, and while our Botticelli does not sing, he does speak – so why not call him Botticelli? The name fits our weird sense of humour – sorry!